Let me preface by saying I have very little experience with SQL, so this may be obvious to someone else.
We have a Windows Server 2008 R2 running SQL Server 2008 R2. We need SQL for a financial accounting program. Yesterday, a user tried pulling a very large report, and the program crashed. Come to find out, the C: drive on the server was completely full. We rebooted the VM, which freed up 5GB. We added an additional 10GB for good measure. Today, the exact same thing happened. User pulled a big report, and the server ran out of space.
We discovered that the transaction log file was as large as the database itself, ~17GB. How could this log file grow by 15GB in 24 hours?? More importantly, if the log file is prone to balloon the way it did, why haven't we had this issue before? We haven't made any changes to the server in many months. Finally, is there some simple way to fix this?
I'd appreciate some pointers. Thanks.